Heinz Dieterich blows a gasket

Quico says: For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Heinz Dietrich is Chávez’s favorite theorist. Or, maybe I should write “used to be”, because I have a feeling when Chávez reads his referendum postmortem, well…

The piece is remarkable from start to finish. Parts of it look like he’s lifted them straight off this blog, while others read like the guy keeps a stash of qualudes by his computer. His main point is that the referendum went badly due to bolivarianismo’s “vertical system of leadership”, which is a little bit like saying that the only problem with this table here is that it has four legs, and a top.

But definitely the best part is when he blames the defeat on…PSFs!

The political price the president has paid for [the vertical system of leadership] was the absence of information about reality, and the filling out of his cabinet and his Miraflores staff with opportunists from the New Political Class who are often not up to their jobs and guarantee his bureaucratic control of the process, but not closeness to the people. A further ring that filters his reality is inside Miraflores where, for instance, the inspectors he is able to send to investigate any problem, have to go through a bottleneck at the Ministry of the Presidency. Something similar happened with the analyses of the “situation room” at the palace where, moreover, control was handed off to a gaggle of young foreign “advisers” (French, Spanish) without political experience, but with very juicy salaries.

That situation with his courtesans was reproduced internationally, generating for him a circuit of individual intellectual sycophants fed with absurd cultural prizes worth $150,000 or $100,000 dollars, and collective ones, such as some leftwing web pages that suppress or marginalize all critical debate about the development of the progressive processes in Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia.

Alas, Dieterich is too much of a “gentlemen” to name names here, but still, I’m dying to know…which intellectuals…which web pages?